Fictive Mediation and Mediated Fiction in the Novels of Giovanni Verga (review)

Fictive Mediation and Mediated Fiction in the Novels of Giovanni Verga represents a much-welcome contribution to scholarship on Verga, verismo, and nineteenth-century Italian literature. Although the book is not without its flaws, Darby Tench provides an expert reading of Verga's masterpiece, I Malavoglia, and highlights the stylistic sophistication of his earlier novels. The book's introduction defines the terms "fictive mediation" and "mediated fiction" while offering a preliminary history of the dialectic between 'immediacy' and 'mediation' in literature.

Chapter 1 provides a theoretical basis for Tench's analysis, which she elaborates throughout the book. Using the preface of I Malavoglia as a point of departure, the author discusses how concepts of 'sincerity', 'nudity', and 'immediacy' relate both to French naturalism and verismo. However, it is Tench's contention that Italian realist authors diminish the distance between reader and text by emphasizing "the subjective power of things" (17), such as the sea in I Malavoglia. This chapter also explores the importance of sound in Verga's story and its contribution to his "poetics of immediacy" (22). Lastly, Tench argues that Verga and his fellow veristi demonstrate an early, almost avant la lettre sensibility to "reader response," as evidenced by their attempts at establishing a mediating relationship between reader and story.

In chapter 2, Tench studies the narrative technique of Verga's early works. While in both "Una peccatrice" and "Storia di una capinera," the narrator-character is not a witness to the tale s/he tells—and therefore cannot mediate the relationship between narrator and story—in "Eva," Verga "explores [. . .] the problematics of doubling in storytelling" (67) through the intense relationship between the narrator and the protagonist Enrico Lanti. Tench proposes a backward reading of the story to illuminate the true sequence of events, and the ways in which Lanti and the narrator take over each other's narrative role. Moreover, she shows how the reader is implicated in the tale. The narrator begins to retreat in "Tigre reale." A bewildered friend of the protagonist, he does not serve as a reliable guide to the reader and therefore signals "a crisis in narration" (87). The narrator in "Eros" represents a return to order, omniscience, and judgment, yet he is not a physical presence since his narrative voice emerges through free indirect discourse.

Chapter 3, the core of Tench's book, focuses on I Malavoglia and its mediators, who hold "discursive, political and economic ascendancy" (120). Overall, Tench's analysis is cogent, but an examination of the female mediators of Aci Trezza would have enhanced her reading. Tench initially focuses on Don Silvestro, town clerk and "intriguer par excellence of Aci Trezza" (130), who controls others primarily through his discourse. She also proposes Silvestro as an author figure since he is distrusted, in part, because of his attachment to the written word. Piedipapera, commercial middleman and "Aci Trezza's preeminent gossip" (151), is the ultimate insider. His crooked foot associates him with the prototype of the "lame devil," which has its roots in the Bible, folklore, and literature. Despite his handicap, Piedipapera moves around town with ease, inhabiting the role of the clown, but with a malicious edge. According to Tench, Piedipapera has a more respectable function, as well, as a narrator of I Malavoglia: he tells different stories to different listeners, and draws from reality to invent stories, thereby parodying impersonal narration. Zio Crocifisso, the third middleman of Aci Trezza, differs from don Silvestro and Piedipapera in his apparent stability: presented in an unambiguous manner, he is static in both body and mind. As a usurer, Crocifisso's principal antecedent is to be found in Shakespeare's Shylock. Tench compares the two characters and explores the different points of view on usury as found in the Bible and the Torah. Crocifisso commits the 'sin' of usury, but not only in the economic sphere. His fits of anger and self-pity amount to superfluous language, or what Tench...